Brainstorm: Imaging Neural Activity at the Speed of Brain with MATLAB

Sylvain Baillet, McGill University

MathWorks and Brainstorm engineers will demonstrate the essential tools offered by Brainstorm to analyse and visualize multidimensional, complex datasets obtained from electrophysiological recordings, with an emphasis on functional brain imaging. We will also cover elements of software architecture and illustrate typical data workflows using MathWorks tools. Demonstrations will include how to:

Organize complex datasets with Brainstorm's Database Explorer

Importing MRI image volumes, surfaces and atlases

Co-registering this data with MEG and EEG

We will cover the key Brainstorm tools for reviewing large MEG/EEG datasets efficiently, for detecting and correcting most artefacts and the basics of filtering and epoching large datasets. Through concrete examples, we will review the basics of MEG/EEG source estimation and how this can lead to exciting new perspectives on millisecond brain activity. We will feature power-spectrum density estimation and time-frequency decompositions of brain signals, evoke recent advances on estimating functional connectivity between brain regions.

Brainstorm is a collaborative, open-source application dedicated to MEG/EEG/sEEG/ECoG data analysis (visualization, processing and advanced source modelling). Our objective is to share a comprehensive set of user-friendly tools with the scientific community using MEG/EEG as an experimental technique. For physicians and researchers, the main advantage of Brainstorm is its rich and intuitive graphic interface, which does not require any programming knowledge. We are also putting the emphasis on practical aspects of data analysis (e.g., with scripting for batch analysis and intuitive design of analysis pipelines) to promote reproducibility and productivity in MEG/EEG research.